Science and the Ego

Big trouble in the world of "Big Physics"

Six months ago, Jan Hendrik Schön seemed like a slam dunk nominee for a Nobel prize. Then some of his colleagues started to take a closer look at his research.

I see articles from time to time about scientists cutting corners or falsifying evidence, and it always seems that the scientific communit are surprised by the development.

I just don't quite understand why.

Several months ago, I read the book "The Death of Innocents", a look at the issue of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome and how some murders are diagnosed as SIDS by mistake.  The book spends a large number of its pages covering how a theory, based on a single case history, launched the entire home infant monitoring industry and has lead a some pretty nice profits for some clinics that do SIDS-prevention screenings.  That same theory also popularized the theory that SIDS can run in families. 

The book also points out exactly why the doctor who made the initial case study should have realized from the outset that what he was seeing was not SIDS, but infanticide - especially since the case in question involved a woman whose 5 children had all died, some under circumstances that could possibly appear to be SIDS but some under circumstances that went against the basic definition of SIDS.  In the case of the two children the doctor observed throughout their entire, short, lives, he knew that sympoms of the supposed breathing problems only manifested when the babies were at home with their mother, and never while the children were in the hospital, and a few of the nurses even spoke to him about their concern that the mother was hurting and killing her children.  In spite of all this, however, the doctor published his paper showing how SIDS ran in families and raising the idea of babies who might be at risk being sent home with monitors to help try and prevent their deaths.

His theory was quickly adopted by the scientific community at large, and with such fervor that even when questions about it were raised, they were often swept aside.  One memorable section in the book talked about how two American doctors claimed they could run monitoring strips on children and predict, from those, which children were at the highest risk and which weren't.  They ran a clinic and made good money from offering the testing services and sales or rentals of the necessary eqiupment.  Then a doctor in England, who thought their claims were pretty much bunk, challenged them.  He, too, had been doing studies and he also had been using the monitoring strips.  He challenged the American doctors to look through a collection of the strips he had that were old enough for the child who's monitoring was reflected on that strip to have aged past the point of being vulnerable to SIDS, and to use their method of evaluation to essentially catagorize the strips by what risk level they would consider the child to be.  Their success rate was abysmally low, to the point where it certainly cast a great deal of doubt among many scientists as to whether their method was of any value at all or not. Unfortunately, this doubt did not reach most parents, who continued to have their children tested and monitored.

Eventually, several years after the children for the initial study had died, and after some were starting to at least raise questions about the doctors original theory, the police and prosecutors in the jurisdiction where the children had died were able to bring the case to trial and convict the mother for her children's deaths.  In the course of the trial, the doctor's theory was also challenged in the court of law and it did not hold up well.  The doctor, however, is still practicing to this day, and still promoting much of the same theory he started with. 

In the end, it basically came down to a man being to prideful to admit he was wrong and that he'd made poor choices because he wanted to vindicate his theory; doctors who invested a lot of their own credibility in his theory and who didn't want to look to be foolish; a sense of intertia that sometimes seems to pervade the scientific community and a lack of ethics that lead many to insist that they knew the truth because it allowed them to keep making the money they'd grown to love.

Another excellent book that looks at charges of scientific impropriety is Science Fictions: A Scientific Mystery, A Massive Cover-Up, and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo.  This book focuses on the discovery of the cause of AIDS and the questionable role Robert Gallo played in it.  Here, again, the scientific community rallied behind a scientist only to later learn that he may not have been playing straight with him.  Gallo was so set on being the discoverer of the virus that caused AIDS that, in the end, he apparently appropriated a bit of tissue that had been sent to him as a sample, claimed it was his own discovery and was awarded a patent on it (along with the National Institutes of Health). 

The dispute over who had actually discovered AIDS and the question as to who was entitled to a patent on it had some interesting side effects, not the least of which was that the first AIDS testing kits available for doctors to use here in America were far inferior to the ones developed by the French, using their research and under their own patent.  It is not an exaggeration to say that, in all likelihood, had the French been allowed their proper due here in the US, many cases of AIDS could have been prevented by earlier and more accurate testing.

These two books cover just two of the more well-known scandels that have struck the scientific community lately.  Now there's a scandel for Physics instead of Biology, but it still seems to be driven by much the same things that drove Drs. Gallo and Steinschneider (who did the initial study on SIDS) - ego.  The need to be seen as the best or the brightest or the "leading expert".   As long as ego is a factor in science, these scandels will continue to occur. 

I suppose in some ways it's good that there is still some shock when a scientist is uncovered as a fraud or, at the very least, unethical.  It means that scientists and the public still expect more from the scientific community.  But it's becoming more and more common it seems, and in the long run, the only effect that will have is that no one will want to trust scientists, either.

Part o the problem appears to stem from the practice of peer-review.  While I understand the basic concept that it makes the most sense to have professionals who have the greatest ability to comprehend what a given paper is saying be the ones who review the paper for publication, it has some fairly serious flaws.  Among these are the recognition that if you're reviewing another scientist's paper, odds are pretty good that at some point he will be reviewing yours; and approving his paper, even if you recognize some flaws in it may be seen as a way of helping ensure that he'll give you similar consideration when it's his turn to read your material.  Another problem is that if you write about a theory that might challenge one of the "greats" in your field, that "great" scientist may well be one of the one's who reviews your paper, and may decide it's better to claim that it's unfit for publication than to allow it to be published and therefore a threat to his own standing. 

Being a non-scientist, I'm not entirely sure what the best alternative would be, but I do think it would be a good idea to start looking for some.  The best might be to find a way to create an independent board, where the members would not be ones who are unlikely to have any kind of interest in whether a paper is published or not - but given the "publish-or-perish" mentality of the sciences, I'm not sure where people like that could be found.

The important thing, though, right now is for the scientific community to be seen attempting to do something about the probem - acknowledging that the problem exists, researching different ideas on how to ensure that papers are judged solely on their merits and not because of who wrote them or what favours they may owe you in the future. Science is, for many non-scientists, as much a matter of faith as any religion.  There may be papers out there containing the proof of a theory, but odds are it will make as much sense to me as if I tried to read the Eddas in Old Norse.  As a result, when I hear on the news that some new discovery has been made or some theory has been confirmed or debunked, I have to take it on faith that what I'm hearing is correct (or I have to learn the advanced principles of a number of sciences and I had enough trouble with the basics of chemistry).  If we're to have faith in science, however, we have to be able to trust the system by which scientific inqueries are presented to the public - and only the scientists can figure out how to fix that.